This time there was almost no field report. I kicked off a "Hoklo Also" policy last week, but didn't run into any more people that looked like they might've been Hoklo speakers. BTW the "algorithm" for this is not quite the same as anywhere else, def. different from Taiwan or Sabah. Details if anyone is interested.

At San Fernando de la Union, I visited the "Ma-cho Temple" (Ma-cho = Mácó· 嬤祖), supposedly the largest "Taoist" temple in the country. I didn't hear anybody speaking Hoklo while I was at the temple. There was much evidence of ties to Taiwan, inc. a record of donations made in the aftermath of cyclone Morakot. Most interesting, on Luzon Mácó· is seen as being one and the same with the Virgin of Caysasay. I'll upload some info on this soon.

The La Union and Pangasinan area has probably had ties to Hokkiàn and Kúiⁿtang since time immemorial. The Hakka (?) pirate 林鳳 Lîm Hōng once made inroads in Lingayen. An animated movie about 林鳳 came out in the Phils a few yrs ago.

Back in Manila. Lots of Hoklo at the mall in Green Hills. No surprise, in a city where Hoklo make up a huge chunk of the upper middle class and the professions. I did hear one 40s-ish lady asking another something in Hoklo.

Binondo is ground zero for Hoklo speakers on Luzon. I decided not to re-visit Binondo b/c I had lots of errands to run elsewhere and other places to see. Not w/o regrets. The news is good coming out of Binondo. Property values continue to be very "strong" there. Revitalization of the district is already under way.

BTW I asked the lady from Lâm'oaⁿ from the pơcûn 飛船 if they spoke Hoklo when out and about in daily life. She said they did. I tried to ask her if her native Lâm'oaⁿ Hoklo was different from Binondo Hoklo, and if she had adjusted toward Binondo Hoklo since she started living there, but she didn't get my drift. I said that a lot of the things her son and her said pretty much resembled Luzon Hoklo as I knew it. She said, "Well, of course, my son grew up here, his Hokkien is far from perfect." But of course her son spoke brilliant Hokkien. Is there a "Luzon Hoklo" or "Binondo Hoklo" with a flavor of its own? I'm guessing there is. Maybe Siamiwako can comment on this if he comes by here by and by.

On the last day, on my way to the markets at Divisoria, I stumbled through a section of Tondo which is really an extension of Binondo. An intense Chinatown feel -- U know what I mean. The streets, the office buildings, the apartments, the shops. Probably 30% of the people in the streets were culturally Tsinoy, the rest were Chinese-Spanish-Pinoy mestizos, a.k.a. Pinoys. With visibly less Chinese and European than, say, the folks shopping at Green Hills or Taguig City near Makati. The dominant language was by far Tagalog. (Caveat: I can't tell Tagalog apart from other Phils languages.)

Nearby, in one of the markets at Divisoria -- where I bargained in one shop in Hoklo once a few yrs ago, come to think of it -- I heard one 40s-ish lady say something to another in Hoklo, something about 90 of something (or a price), and how someone wasn't coming anyway, so forget about it. "M̄ bián--lah," she said, but she said it like miang, with a high-level tone. My head spun around to see who was talking. She noticed me noticing her right away.

On the packed light rail, I was surprised to hear a mother-son duo -- teenage son, 40-ish mother -- talking in full Hoklo. They spoke kind of hush-hush, though, I couldn't understand hardly any of it. They were speaking pure Hoklo as far as I could tell -- no code-switching, no words from Tag or Eng as far as I could see. They got off at the stop on the edge of Binondo.

Conclusions and observations so far:1) There are still people in the Phils who actively speak Hokkien, right down to the kids, poss. even to each other. 2) They pretty much all live in Binondo and the "Binondo spillover" zones. In the rest of Manila, Tsinoys middle-aged and over -- representing a disproportionate section of the business class -- may generally speak Hoklo and even read Chinese, but their kids probably don't, and they themselves probably use Tagalog and English a lot more in their daily lives. In the past, some of them may've also used Spanish and the Manila version of the Chabacano Spanish creole, both of which are dying out on Luzon.3) Social circles may be pretty closed. The classic Chinatown worldview and mindset, with a Phils twist. The kids go to Chinese schools, where they're joined by lots of mestizo and pure Pinoy kids.4) These Hokkien speakers are probably economically less well off than the suburban Tsinoys, who seem to identify with English over Tagalog and really don't speak Hokkien anymore. (Sound familiar?)5) There is not the same "Let's All Speak Mandarin! Yay, Mandarin!" vibe that U get in SG, MY, and even post-Suharto ID, not to mention TW and most of China.6) Even new businesses seem to choose their names (both Chinese and Anglo/Pinoy) based on Hokkien considerations. For example, a spa called Senses was called 仙詩三温䁔 in hanji.

In closing, the Luzon Hoklo, esp. Binondo Hoklo, give me this feeling of marching to an older beat than the PRC or even the ROC. A 反清復明, 鄭成功, 嬤祖-worshipping consciousness seems to pervade their Chineseness. Their media talks about "Taiwan" issues w/o taking on hysterical, nationalistic tones -- unlike MY/SG. The idea of maritime Hoklo power on "the islands" seems natural to them. When they go to China, they go to Coanciu and Amoy. To them, Coanciu and Amoy IS China.

All the rest will have to stay unsaid for now. I'll leave it to aPin to make his way to the islands and flesh out this field report some more.

A relevant draft found online, "Influx of New Chinese Immigrants to the Philippines: Problems and Challenges" -- presented by Teresita Ang See in 2004. I think that's the same lady provided the Hokkien translation in the court case this month.

http://192.38.121.218/issco5/documents/AngSeepaper.doc

She quotes a Hokkien sio̍kgí 俗語 in the draft: ' “Tua-kiao po diao diao, Sio-kiao bo chap siao (in Hokkien).” It means that for big-time investors, China can give all the protection needed but for small investors, China would not care less...'

This is wonderful news. Thank you for writing all of this, I wish I had known about a week ago, when I was writing about the vitality of non-mandarin Chinese in Southeast Asia.

I don't know when I'll get there any time soon, but the whole idea of a Chinatown like that sounds like a Hokkien 世外桃源.

The Philippine Chinese newspapers I read actually did have a bit about the Japanese War and what was going on in China, but very little about the Chinese society of Manila deeper than who was going to which ball wearing which dress. A historian had asked me to look for materials on a particular subject.

I didn't even expect that I would find Hokkien terms in it. otherwise I would have kept an eye out.

The population of Filipino Chinese are mostly from Fujian province background, hence Min-nan (Lan-nang-oe see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lan-nang) dialect is prevalently spoken in Chinese communities. I can't tell the difference between Luzon Lan-nang-oe and Binondo Lan-nang-oe, but I can say that from memory, metro area has some words that are not found in other southern provinces due to Tagalog influence from up north**:

*I can't be certain if this is a Min-nan phrase or a Tagalog phrase**Correct me if I am wrong here, I can't seem to find the correlation between these words with any Min-nan phrases

Due to large number of recent migrants from Fujian province, there's also a need to confirm that fluent speakers (no switching/no mixing of local words) are brought up locally as I believe this group is extremely rare. First generation Filipino Chinese, locally born and raised, will always find hard to get rid of word mixing.

Last edited by siamiwako on Sat Jun 25, 2011 3:13 am, edited 3 times in total.

SMWK, that post was a phenomenon. Kì goá só· cai, that is the first time anybody anywhere has put up info about the new aspects of Pinoy Hokkien onto the worldwide web. Did y'all dudes from the Malacca Straits ever imagine Manila Hokkien and Zamboanga Hokkien could be just as far apart as Medan Hokkien and Johor Hokkien?

Using kanji, Hoklo on Luzon "spell out" every last place name on each of the 7,167 Philippine Islands. Not just any kanji literate person can effectively use a Tsinoy map of the Philippines to get around unfamiliar spots in the archipelago unless they got Basic Hoklo under their belt along with their kanji.

As far as they can, the Pinoy Hoklo "spell" out Pinoy place names using kanji people would use to name places back in Banlam. 呂宋 岷里(拉?) 王彬 三寶顏 納卯 仙範 碧瑤 宿霧 將軍. The "New Chinese" of the ROC-PRC and their spinoffs (TW/SG/MY) purposely pick "stiff" kanji that look and sound foreign: 馬尼拉 民答那峨 大堡... The Pinoy Hoklo went to the islands and found a home. The New Chinese only go to the islands on package tours or to wait out some new papers and move to the First World.

Notice again. In spite of the so-called flood of New China folk, all the Sino papers in the streets still be in "vintage kanji". In the week after Manila renamed the South China Sea to "West Philippine Sea" in Pinoy parlance, guess what the Siong Po 商報 was calling that lake? U guessed it. 南海. Not 南中國海, not 中國南海. Ṃ sị Sehái 西海, ṃ sị Saihái 西海, ṃ sị 呂宋海, ṃ sị 內中海.

Since we are on the topic of Philippines Hoklo, I should have remembered this...

A few months ago, I posted a new topic on Minnan in the martial arts:http://www.chineselanguage.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=10969

One of the more prominent academies teaching the Sao Lim Ngo Cho Kun(少林五祖拳) or Shaolin Five Ancestors Boxing is actually the 菲律賓中華鳴謙國術社 Philippines Beng Kiam Chinese Martial Arts Academy (http://www.bengkiam.com/Index.aspx), based in Manila. I wonder how much Hokkien they still use, in addition to the names of the various forms and movements.

With all that I have read so far from amhoanna's field reports, the short if it is that it sounds like the Philippines is a near-perfect fossilisation of late 19th century 泉州Coan Ciu dialect, with even the writing system having suffered minimal intrusion from the onslaught of Modern Standard Chinese (sounds like they insulated themselves even better than Malaysia!). Taking into consideration, of course, that the trade-off is the relatively fewer speakers by headcount. It is interesting that the picture is totally different from the one I got from reading Lynn Pan's The Encyclopaedia of the Chinese Overseas, where the chapter on the Philippines gave me the impression that written Chinese is almost non-existent (there is a black-and-white photo of the swearing-in of the new committee for the Chinese Association, but none of the banners in the background were in Chinese).

amhoanna wrote:As far as they can, the Pinoy Hoklo "spell" out Pinoy place names using kanji people would use to name places back in Banlam. 呂宋 岷里(拉?) 王彬 三寶顏 納卯 仙範 碧瑤 宿霧 將軍. The "New Chinese" of the ROC-PRC and their spinoffs (TW/SG/MY) purposely pick "stiff" kanji that look and sound foreign: 馬尼拉 民答那峨 大堡... The Pinoy Hoklo went to the islands and found a home. The New Chinese only go to the islands on package tours or to wait out some new papers and move to the First World.

When you say "spell", do you mean phonologically spell out the place names or rename the place in Hokkien according to their local meaning?

In Penang, there are a lot of renaming too in town area, where Chinese is denser. Like 龍尾 (strange, we don't say lengbui. Its longbui.), 五條路, 七條路 etc. I am quite sure they are not based on Malay names though.

Nonetheless, at places recently developed, we adopt the "stiff" transliteration from Malay. Like Bayan Lepas, Bayan Baru. (We don't even have a commonly known Chinese name for it.)

Just had the chance last night to listen to the recording for John Wangli's (王黎 / Ông Lê) Mandarin-English-Tagalog-Hokkien primer. A few short observations, besides the voiceperson having a beautiful voice:

1) Crisp, musical, sensual Coanciu accent. 2) No central vowel. Vowels follow Amoy pattern. Wonder if this may've actually came about on site, on the islands.3) Tones follow Coanciu pattern. I've heard this pattern in Klang as well. The cadence also feels not quite the same. That's probably what I find so sexy about the Coanciu accent. It's probably also why I and maybe many others have a hard time understanding Coanciu Hoklo. 4) Recordings are key! Turns out I was wrong in many places as to how to interpret the bad romanizations. The first example comes to mind is Ong Le's "ma" for MEAT. In the recordings, it's clearly POJ "mah".

1. Hi, Siamiwako. Glad U stopped by to enrich this thread. Your post actually holds way more info than the Wiki article U linked to, ditto for the Mando Wiki. We'll have to add the good info in this thread to Wiki by and by.

2. In an "unrelated development", just a couple days ago something in the air must've jarred my mind and I thought to myself, Hey, what if there was a kind of Hokkien with bits of Spanish in it? Then my conscious mind said maybe such a dialect exists or once existed on the islands between Taiwan and Sulawesi. Then I read your post and go, Wow!

3. By Luzon Hoklo, I just meant the Hokkien spoken on Luzon. By Binondo Hoklo, I mean the Hokkien spoken in Binondo. I really don't know if Hoklo is spoken differently in different spots around Luzon. I do know the Hokkien spoken in Cebu ain't quite the same as the Binondo kind.

4. A couple of corrections to the Wiki, just for the record.

4a. Not all Pinoy Hokkien dialects have 7-toneme systems. In fact the Hokkien in Ong Le's recording -- I'm guessing this is Binondo Hoklo -- runs on 8 tonemes.

4b. Why the insistence that Hoklo satbûn comes from a European language, not Tagalog? Very telling, in my mind. Just a Tn̂glâng conceit that Tn̂glâng borrow nothing from hoanná. The common wisdom among linguists is that the word comes from Malay. I think it may well have been either Malay or Tagalog. I doubt most linguists ever imagined it could've come from Tagalog, but they underestimate or aren't aware of how thick ties were w/i the Banlam - Luzon - Formosa triangle.

4c. Why the assumption that Pinoy Hoklo "tse-ke", meaning CHECK (method of payment), comes from Taiwanese? I mean, there's no such word in TW Hoklo. Vs the Spanish word "cheque" (pronounced like POJ cekkè) which I think has been loaned into every Pinoy trade language. Once again, this is kind of telling: Pinoy Hoklo seem to feel this instinctive tie, or bond, to TW Hoklo--poss. in that Banlam-Luzon-Formosa way--whereas Hoklo farther west actually seem to feel no special closeness to TW Hoklo, even seeing them as "the crazy wing" of the Hoklo diaspora, whereas TW Hakka can be quite cuddly... (U guys can confirm this or debunk it.)

5. Some specific questions concerning SMWK's post.

5a.

Bantay* - Really (e.g. Ke kh'a bantay kui 價錢真貴)

This must be Tagalog. No non-Pinoy dialect that I know of uses this word. It's so interesting that this word is so integrated into Pinoy Hokkien that U weren't even sure if it came from Tagalog or "Old Hokkien".

5b. BTW is "ke kh'a" the word for PRICE? What tone is the "kh'a"? Reminds me of the Siamese word for PRICE.

5c.

Di wu pala beh?

What's the vowel in "beh"? What does the word rhyme with?

5d.

jiong zuai sauli t'o-i

What's this "t'o"? What does it rhyme with? What's the tone on it? Does it mean TO GIVE when it stands alone w/o other verbs?

5e. All the words U introduced seem to natural to Hokkien, just like most of the Malay words in Melaka Straits Hokkien.

5f. About "word mixing": point taken. To be honest, though, I have so much trouble understanding Coanciu Hoklo to begin with, and, even when I do understand it, it's in spite of a raft of "exotic" sounding vocabulary... So if I heard someone say "Si di a'be paga din, lan ceci laikhi" (IF YOU ALSO HAVEN'T PAID YET, LET'S GO OVER NOW), I probably wouldn't understand it, but I would probably think it was "pure" Hoklo.

6. Mark -- Have U been to the Phils? The use of hanji in public in the Phils (outside of Binondo) kind of reminds me of Panamá, the most "pervasively Chinese" city in the Western Hemisphere. Probably only a couple percent of Pinoys can read hanji, but hanji are everywhere in the Manila-Angeles-Tarlac, area -- sparse compared to Penang or Bangkok, but reaching far and deep. I esp. noticed this when I went back to Manila from Ilokos by bus. The presence of hanji in Ilokos is something more on the level of California or maybe Sydney.

7. Chinese-literate Pinoys are, I think, a stealthy group. Something I remember well / 印象真深: in a department store in Davao, down south, a huge chunk of the books section was Chinese-language cookbooks. It wasn't just a few titles. It was three or four shelves running for at least a meter each, maybe more. I didn't see many obvious Tsinoys when I was in Davao. I didn't hear a word of Hoklo in the air. Could it be that people were buying these books and just using the pictures? I asked the sióciá, "So many cookbooks in Chinese. Who buys these?" And she said matter-of-factly, "The Chinese people here."

8. Siamiwako is a virtuoso Chinese writer himself. He has poetry up on the web. Nā ū hèngchù ê lâng, PM him.

9. My gut feeling is that port cities like Manila, Bangkok and, most obviously, Singapore are actually "re-sinicizing" as we speak. The "black-and-white-photo era" was the height of Anglo power as well as a low point for Sino power. Even in the '80s, I think a lot of Tn̂glâng just took it for granted that there was no such thing as Sino power, besides the o·siāhoē.

10. Yelei, I mean using hanji, with their Hokkien "sound values", to transcribe non-Sino place names. This is not what I mean by "stiff", though. What's stiff, then? Well, in Modern Standard Chinese, when people use hanji with their Mandarin sound values to transcribe non-Sino place names, they actually go out of their way to use words that look and feel "foreign". Notice this is not what the Hoklo did when they got to Formosa, Luzon, etc.

11. My observation: in M'sia and pretty much all of Nusantara, Hokkien- and Teochew-based transcriptions tend not to be stiff. This goes for most place names. 古晉 霹靂 詩巫 爪哇 麻六甲 ... these are names that could just as well be given to places in Tn̂gsoaⁿ. But M'sian small businesses seem to prefer Mandarin-based transcription with stiff, i.e. "foreign-looking" hanji. Just go to the mall and check out the names of the Sino-owned hair salons. Now, I realize there's a big old grey area in between, not to mention straight-up Sino-sense names like 新山 泰京 太平 巨港 峴港 which fall outside this discussion...

12.

Aha! Another example of the elided -i- in syllables with -iong, just like Khí-hiông 起雄, which becomes khí-hông in Penang. I wonder if there are any more examples?

Widespread in TW. I associate it with the piedmont and plains zones that skew Ciangciu. Young people from those areas seem to've toned it down compared to their parents' generation. Just my impression.

Why the insistence that Hoklo satbûn comes from a European language, not Tagalog? Very telling, in my mind. Just a Tn̂glâng conceit that Tn̂glâng borrow nothing from hoanná. The common wisdom among linguists is that the word comes from Malay.

I doubt it is from Tagalog. Tagalog probably has it from Spanish. This is what the Oxford English Dictionary has to say about the etymology of "soap"

A word widely represented in the European languages. Within the Germanic group the forms are Old English sápe, Old Frisian type *sêpe (West Frisian sjippe, East Frisian sêpe, North Frisian sîp), Middle Dutch seepe (Dutch zeep), Middle Low German and Low German sêpe (hence Danish sæbe), Old High German seifa, seipha (Middle High German seiffe, saiffe, etc., German seife); the Old Norse and Icelandic sápa (Norwegian saapa, Swedish såpa) is apparently < Old English. The early Germanic *saipōn- is the source on the one hand of Finnish saip(p)io, saip(p)ua, Lapp saipo, and on the other of Latin sāpo (first mentioned by Pliny), whence Italian sapone, French savon, Spanish jabon, Portuguese sabão, Romanian sapun, sapon, etc. Whether the word is of purely Germanic origin is doubtful; its occurrence in some of the Tartar languages may indicate that it was introduced by early trade from the East.

What I mean is that the word probably didn't move from (most likely) Portuguese into Hoklo directly, but rather via Malay or Tagalog. Malay does seem more likely from what I know. The fact that the word has a similar contour in Malay, Tagalog, Hoklo, etc., also seems to suggest that it was borrowed from (most likely) Portuguese into a Nusantara trade language, and eventually from there to the backwaters of many a SEA province. It doesn't seem likely that that trade language would've been Hokkien. Most likely it was "hoanna before Hoklo".

Here is my phonological analysis of the tonemes in the Philippine Hoklo found in the file. I use a three-level tone scale since that is what exists in this dialect (and most Hoklo dialects I know) on a phonological level. Tip of the hat to the Coảnciu jịtián on the UCLA website. Couldn't've made such fast work of T6-T7 w/o it.

1) The 11 and 22 running tones--excluding T6 阳上--seem subject to a system of "tone sandhi". E.g. T1 seems to go to 11 when followed by citation T2. ... T5 and T7 seem to go to 22 when followed by a syllable with the contour 22. Generally, this dialect seems to be averse to having a low-level contour and a mid-level contour in adjacent syllables! Họkbụseng 服務生 becomes mid-level, mid-level, mid-level. Not sure if this is a Coanciu thing or a Luzon thing.

2) Atonal syllables "suffixed" to the end of a sandhi group seem to do strange things, at least the first such syllable. For example the question particle 無 takes a high-falling tone (!) either usually or always. The contour of the citation syllable in the group may have a bearing.

3) All final stops, most notably the glottal stop, stay true to themselves at any position, whether running, citation, or suffixed.

4) The 阴 (T1 thru T4) citation tones are the same as the running tones for those tones in mainstream TW. In some places she seems to have running T2 as 33- and T3 as 31-. Not sure if I'm hearing things, or if maybe the voiceperson watches a lot of TW Hoklo TV, or if maybe the Amoy-type tone system has also been well-represented in the Phils. It wouldn't be too far-fetched for the Tng literary layer to run on one set of tone rules, and the older layers to run on another, but it seems this isn't the case.